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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

How wild is London?

This is the first in a series of installments that I plan to write about my recent experiences in London. These will alternate on my two blogs, as I was there to discover both parks and the wealth of arts that London has to offer. In the end I envision a synthesis of these interests for one of the most important things I learned in London, an enormous city that is both ancient and modern, is that separating things into discrete categories is difficult and in the end a distortion of the total experience.

Installment 1: Arrival

The aluminum tube with wings that delivered my wife and me across
the Atlantic Ocean lands without incident at Heathrow Airport somewhere on the
outskirts of London. After a brief train ride aboveground through a
dreary-looking urban landscape, reminiscent of BBC productions of Masterpiece
Mystery, we are deposited in Paddington Station. We descend to London’s famous
underground for a ride on the Tube. An hour and a half and two transfers later,
we ascend two long escalators. We have traversed most of London and crossed
under the river Thames, although there is no way of knowing this. Completely
disoriented, we huddle in the shelter of the Cutty Sark Station in Greenwich, greeted
with gusting flurries of snow.

Our ten-day adventure in London begins with this auspicious
sign. Others might have viewed it with apprehension. Snow in April, while not
unheard of, is definitely not what we expected. We would soon learn that
Londoners too were particularly happy to be rid of March, which had broken
records for cold temperatures. So far April was proving to be similarly
disappointing. But for me the blustery weather signals the presence of the
unexpected, which author David Gessner identifies as one of the primary
characteristics of the wild.

Gessner proclaims, “…wildness can happen anywhere. You can’t
put a fence around it. It can happen in the jungle or on a city river.” Perhaps
even on a city street, although I wouldn’t want to pound the idea into
meaninglessness. This snow isn’t what I came to London to experience by any
means. I would have been far happier with warm sunshine. But the unseasonable
snow is nature’s way of asserting itself—inserting itself into even one of the
largest cities on the planet. And its unpredictability quotient has increased in
recent years, to the point where only the few and the rigidly ideological deny
the effects of climate change.

Still dragging my rolling luggage behind me, I
tighten my scarf, zip up my coat, and walk into the swirl of snow. Welcome to
London.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The towers of London's docklands dissolve in the misty background.

To read installment number 2, about London's National Gallery of Art, click here.